CROSS COUNTRY: Sherman Indian’s Thompson set for state

RIVERSIDE – He might not look it, slender and soft-spoken as he is, but Isaiah Thompson is a tough guy.

A disciplined, determined strong man.

The Riverside Sherman Indian senior’s impressive internal fortitude was on display last week, when he dug deep and rallied for a one-second victory in the CIF-SS Division 5 cross country championship race.

Coming from 30 yards back and taking his only lead at the finish, his was an historic kick.

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The Braves hadn’t produced an individual CIF champion since Kenneth Comyestewa ran to victory in 1936.

And Thompson’s time -- 14 minutes, 40 seconds – was a division record on the 2.91-mile Mt. San Antonio College rain course.

“He really didn’t have the lead through the race at all – until the very end,” dad Marcus Thompson said. “What that shows is you don’t give up. If you keep working hard, if you stay with it, look what happens. And not only did he win, he broke the course record.”

Thompson, 17, was the Inland area’s sole individual winner last Saturday, but he’ll be joined by four area boys teams and three area girls teams that also qualified for Saturday’s CIF State Championship at Woodward Park in Fresno.

Thompson made the trip to state last year too, even though he still considered himself a basketball player, and even though he’d never put in any actual off-season cross country training.

He finished 21st. And then, in the spring, he finished third in the 800 meters at the CIF-SS Division IV championship.

A new idea was afoot.

“I came to my senses and saw that the sport can do some big things for me in my life,” said Isaiah Thompson, whose mother, Louise Tompkins, is of the Kumeyaay tribe.

He followed Sherman Indian cross country coach Tom Colley’s training instructions this summer, running about 400 miles in all and about eight per day.

And the student with the 4.0 grade-point average and the budding interests in kinesiology, engineering and psychology has received recruiting interested from Texas Christian, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the University of Redlands.

“I never would’ve imagined it, it never would’ve even crossed my mind,” said Thompson, whose exploits are well-known on the Sherman Indian campus, where he began boarding as a freshman because his parents wanted to keep him far from potential problems in his old Valley Center neighborhood.

“I never even heard of cross country until I got here.”

But soon after he arrived at Sherman Indian, Thompson’s basketball coach recommended he use distance running to train for going all-out on the hardwood.

“Initially, he was really into basketball,” Marcus Thompson said. “But Isaiah is a competitor, and he’s always been very disciplined when it comes to his body, and that led to him running a lot.

“And that led to him going even further with that, starting initially with track and field, and then, under that same umbrella, with distance running. And it just blossomed.”

That’s so even though Thompson skipped out on cross country as a sophomore, dejected by a third-place finish at league finals and having narrowly missed CIF finals (results that would have delighted most ninth-graders).

“I wasn’t winning,” Thompson said. “And it’s always nice to win.”

And it would be nice to cap his historic senior season with another gutsy highlight.

“Going back there and being one of the favorites to actually win it (is) a dream come true,” Thompson said. “Winning will mean the world to me.”